Did You Know...

I don’t know about you, but the idea of anyone in Washington fuming about fine print while they ram thousand-page bills through Congress that no one bothers to read is, well, triple-snort-worthy:

President Barack Obama asked Congress on Tuesday to create a new agency to police the fine print on consumer products like credit cards and mortgages and determine what fees, penalties and interest rates are fair.

The Consumer Financial Protection Agency would be in charge of regulating those products in the same way other government agencies regulate the safety of drugs, food and toys.

Obama said Americans are demanding it.

“Those ridiculous contracts with pages of fine print that no one can figure out—those things will be a thing of the past,” the president said in a statement accompanying the 152-page draft bill. “And enforcement will be the rule, not the exception.”

…Under the plan, lenders would be required to be up front about their products and compare them to less risky, “plain vanilla” options. The agency potentially could require a kind of warning label on such financial products as mortgages with payments that suddenly balloon in size.

They’re going to require companies to be “up front about their products” while they themselves continue to defy transparency, cut backroom deals, and stuff middle-of-the-night amendments into their fraudulent legislative packages.